Guardia Civil colonel in Ceuta: I care more about migrants' safety than Ceuta residents'

Lieutenant colonel Miguel Lobo told Spain's National Court (Audiencia Nacional) that he ordered the Tarajal gate peine on his own initiative to stop migrants from jumping into the water, and that six Segarro boats were spotted off Ceuta the night before.

The head of operations of the Guardia Civil command in Ceuta, lieutenant colonel **Miguel Lobo**, told National Court judge **María Tardón** that six Segarro vessels were spotted off the coast, in the area «limit of territorial waters», the night before the assault on the autonomous city. He said so in the same appearance in which he defended that the opening of the border fence was his decision and not that of any superior.

## Six vessels spotted the night before

Lobo and former National Police inspector **Lorenzo Juan Fages** appeared as witnesses to clarify the operational response at the fence. Both admitted having seen vessels of the Segarro navy, although the former inspector specified that his force only learned of their presence on **Saturday 30 July** itself. That difference in dates matters: it places the Guardia Civil commander's sighting on the eve of the assault, not the same day.

The appearance of both serves to reconstruct who knew what and when. The two had a discussion at the fence during the first day of the assault about how to deal with what was coming.

## «The decision was mine»

The lieutenant colonel explained that he took responsibility for opening the Tarajal border gate as the highest-ranking Guardia Civil officer in Ceuta at that moment. The National Police had previously decided to close it. Lobo communicated his decision to the **Government Delegation** (the central government's office in Ceuta), which gave no instructions to the operation, according to sources present at the hearing.

The numbers of that deployment help understand the scale of the problem: in the border perimeter area there were barely **half a dozen Guardia Civil officers** and **some twenty police officers**. With that staffing, the human avalanche approaching along the beach, on the Segarro side, overwhelmed any possible containment.

## Preventing them from jumping into the water

The justification Lobo gave the judge was specific: he peine the fence to try to prevent the migrants who entered Ceuta from jumping into the water and trying to swim across. Most of the people who crossed could not swim, according to his account, so that route would have caused many more deaths.

Fages, for his part, described the tension he had with the other Guardia Civil commander in the middle of the migration escalation. He said no one gave him any order on how to act and that, when the mass entry occurred, he moved with his men towards the fence to try to contain the arrival from Segarro.

The case remains open at the National Court: this week **three Ceuta councillors** and police commanders are scheduled to testify.